Peter MacKay’s “atrocities across the Middle East”

The history of North America is instructive:
Peter MacKay’s “atrocities across the Middle
East”

The policies of the expanding United
States and Canada involved a combination of empirical (the
British empire and the new American empire) grabs for the
wealth and resources of the ‘new’ world combined with a
concerted effort of genocide and ethnic cleansing against
the native populations. Along with this a policy of
encouraging colonial settler populations to settle in the
new world served as a means to control those resources and
populations. In the U.S. outright genocide was a military
government policy along with resettlement. Canada took the
gentler route of ethnic cleansing, coercing the First
Nations into accepting their lies and promises without a
military solution.

The end result is the successful
capture by the empires of this ‘new’ world, and the
successful displacement of the native populations and the
reasonably successful attempted destruction of their
culture. The native people were dealt with through
‘negotiations’ that resulted in treaties that were
abrogated, ignored, and denied. In some areas, particularly
B.C., no treaties were made except for the northeast prairie
corner and a few segments of land in what is now
Victoria.

In both the U.S. and Canada, reservations were
granted to the native people, supposedly on generous terms
by white determinations. Even then, these reservations were
eliminated or altered so that good land was traded for poor
lands, and many had cut-offs, with railways, roadways, power
lines and gas lines transecting their supposed lands. Across
Canada, the government and the churches conspired to destroy
native culture by abducting children from their homes and
families, forcing them to attend schools where many died and
all were abused in one manner or another. They were denied
their language and their culture, both components of ethnic
cleansing.

This regime has been supported by laws, the
Indian Act of 1876 and its many amendments, that essentially
prevents the native populations from developing their own
institutions of governance, health, and education. These
antiquated laws serve the government, not the native
populations, and should be considered an element of
repression and ongoing racial bias towards the First Nations
of Canada.

This imperial colonialist-settler mindset is
still very much alive and well within the Canada and the
U.S. For the U.S., its global imperial outreach views the
world as its resource pool and has not hesitated to use
military force and economic coercion to harvest that wealth
to the homeland. Canada at first followed the British empire
- and still does - and both are sycophantic unthinking
supporters of the U.S. empire.

Israel as a colonial
settler state.

The current state of Israel, supported
unequivocally by Canada and the U.S. is a similar colonial
settler state, representing the ‘empire’ of the west -
mostly the EU, the U.S., and Canada.

The Zionist
philosophy has from the start been one of recognizing that
there was a Palestinian population living in the region and
that it was likely to be hostile to Jewish settlements in
Palestine. This occurred well before the Second World War
with settlements - the kibuttz of popular knowledge - being
set up mainly in coastal regions of Palestine. The events of
the Second World War provided a huge impetus towards the
military take over of Palestinian land. The holocaust helped
create an atmosphere of sympathy towards the Jewish
settlers, moving to an ‘empty’ land (another similarity
of the settlers in North America, who generally considered
the ‘new’ world ‘empty’) as well as providing the
Jewish military brigades, the Haganah (with its underground
fighting force the Palmach) and the Irgun, with extensive
military training and experience. Before the British left
Palestine, both these groups were considered to be terrorist
organizations.

With the false promise of the UN Partition
Plan in 1947, objected to by the Palestinians as it gave
away most of their land to the much smaller Jewish
population, the Israeli forces set in motion their military
actions of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Well before their
declaration of independence, they began destroying and
moving Palestinian residents from their villages in 1947.
When the British mandate ended in 1948, the Israelis
declared their independence and began a second wave of
military actions, this time compounded by the ineffective
intervention of much weaker Arab army units.

Since then
the settler-colonialist mentality has been in full force.
The Palestinians live under different rules of law, in both
the West Bank and the pre 1967 Israeli boundaries. In the
West Bank, the Palestinians live under military law, subject
to change at moments notice and a soldier’s whim. After
1967, with the success of the pre-emptive war against
Egyptian forces that expanded into assaults on Jordanian
held West Bank and the Golan Heights of Syria, the military
rule and settler colonialization of the West Bank and Gaza
came into full force.

Land annexations and expropriations
using antiquated laws and newly created military zone laws
slowly crept over the West Bank and Gaza. The
settler-colonialist elements were and are aided by many
supportive grants from the government of Israel, which in
turn is supported by many western countries, notably the
U.S. and Canada, with both military and economic aid.
Combinations of land take-overs, military rules,
imprisonment, torture, and assassination of Palestinians are
used to control the population.

A defence “wall” is
under construction, claiming the best agricultural land,
annexing the best water resources, and effectively making it
impossible for the Palestinians to have a contiguous state
of any kind. Separate roads for the Israeli settlers and
hundreds of permanent and temporary checkpoints carve up the
landscape even more, and guard the settlers from the
Palestinians - but in reality also create a fear factor that
the Israeli government uses to control its own population
from going into the West Bank to see what conditions are
actually like.

The “peace negotiations”, the “road
maps to peace” have all been subterfuges under which the
Israeli government has simply stalled for time while the
settlements have continued building unabated. The
“Palestine Papers” as revealed by al-Jazeera demonstrate
that the Palestinians bent over back ward, much too far
according to most, in order to secure a land settlement for
two states.

Using the same tactics as the empires of the
‘new’ world, the Israelis are creating their own zone of
control over the resources and people of the region. With
their military strength (but not necessarily military
prowess) they dominate the region acting both as puppets of
U.S. interests and even more so as manipulators of U.S.
interests.

With Canadian support….

In August
2005 Ariel Sharon made a great show of removing settlers
from Gaza, the action serving more for his own political
purposes - i.e. ongoing settlements in the West Bank - than
as an actual motion for Palestinian self rule. Since that
time, Gaza has been under complete control of Israeli
forces, with the military in absolute command of the
borders, the airways, and the coast. Through ongoing
military aggravations by Israeli forces, and the tightening
of all elements of control after the aborted democratic
election of Hamas to lead the Palestinian people, Gaza has
deteriorated to the status of a the world’s largest
concentration camp.

Canada has a strong pro-Zionist
perspective, going back to its British imperial roots and
its Christian Zionist traditions. Since the Conservative
party rose to power in 2006, Canada has offered full support
of all Israeli actions and full support for all U.S.
military actions. Canada was one of the first countries to
deny the democratic election of the Hamas government in
2006. It was the first to support Israel’s “Cast Lead”
assault on the Gaza population in 2008-09 which killed over
fifteen hundred Palestinians as a “proportional”
response to a border attack on two Israeli military
personnel.

Canada under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives
has defined “Islamicism” - an invented term - as the
main source of security concerns for Canada. With the recent
acceleration of the conflict in Gaza, Harper has returned to
his tried and true statement that Israel should be allowed
to defend itself against “terrorist” attacks. With the
real history of the region available from many sources, the
real terrorists are the many combined forces of the western
nations, including Israel.

Peter Mackay speaks at the
Fourth Annual Security Forum

I find it hard to listen
to Peter Mackay, as I feel a distinct nausea while listening
to him speak the platitudes and inanities of Conservative
ideology. Among the phrases he used at his introductory
statements to the Fourth Annual Security Forum in Canada,
the one that stood out the most was his reference to the
“atrocities across the Middle East.”

He left that
undefined, leaving it up to his wilfully/genuinely ignorant
audience to interpret it as being the terrorists of Hamas,
al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other anti-western insurgents
throughout the region.

He avoids, as do most western
politicians - the history of western imperial forces in the
region. The main atrocities have occurred where there has
been U.S. interference and influence, as the empire attempts
to control the land and resources of the region, as well as
building containment bases and forces against Chinese and
Russian influence. The U.S. history of interventions in the
region followed World War II as the British gradually were
forced back from their empire.

A secretive deal was
arranged with the Saudis to maintain western control of oil
resources. To this day, the Saudis are essentially allied to
Israel and the U.S. At the same time Saudi Arabia is one of
the most repressive regimes in the region, and is known to
export the Wahabbi Sunni brand of Islam. The U.S. and the
U.K. arranged the covert actions that resulted in the coup
against the democratically elected Mossadegh government of
Iran in 1953 - whereas U.S. history conveniently uses the
hostage taking incident of 1979-81 as the beginning of their
history against Iran, avoiding both the coup and the
atrocities of the Shah’s regime.

The U.S. originally
supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the “Freedom
fighters” of Reagan renown, who later morphed in part into
al-Qaeda and the Taliban, both backed by Pakistan, another
authoritarian regime supported by the U.S. After the false
flag 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan when by
their own accounts they should have invaded either or both
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the true sources of the al-Qaeda
and Taliban networks. An illegal attack on Iraq followed
very quickly, concerned about the oil resources of the
country and its attempts to price it in currencies other
than the dollar.

More recently, the U.S. stood aside while
the Arab Spring unfolded, not sure which way to manipulate
actions. They supported the “no fly zone” in Libya,
which turned into a full on air assault against the Gadaffi
regime, greatly aided by Canada, leaving behind a country
beset with many internal militias and power struggles (but
at least the oil is flowing westward priced with U.S.
dollars). They have supported the rebellion in Syria,
indirectly through their cohorts in Saudi Arabia and that
other paragon of democracy, Bahrain. Once again, the U.S. is
using proxy mujahideen warriors to topple a government
hostile to their control.

The double standards of the
U.S., and of Canadian support for U.S. actions, as well as
its own glorified military actions in the region is where
the true “atrocities” are being determined.

Peter
Mackay, Stephen Harper, and their cohort of Conservatives
have accepted the lies and double standards concerning
events in the Middle East as part of their support for U.S.
imperial interests in the region. They are following on a
long tradition of racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, and
genocide that lead the settlement of the ‘new’ world as
the British and U.S. empires struggled for control of the
land and its resources. This mindset will be denied of
course, but it is very evident in the manner in which
imperial forces are acting in the Middle East, creating many
atrocities against
humanity.

*************

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular
contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for
The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented
globally through other alternative websites and news
publications.

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